Are Podiobooks Kindle’s Killer App?

[I don’t have a Kindle, so somebody tell me if it it already does this.  But what with all the hoohah about text-to-speech, I doubt it.]

I prefer to listen to books whenever I can.  Often that’s a book on CD that I’ve ripped to MP3, but more often it’s a “podiobook” that I can have served up to me in chapter sized chunks.  I can listen while driving, on the treadmill, or even in the dark of the bedroom before going to bed, without waking up my wife. 

So when the Kindle (and Sony eReader) came out, I wasn’t all that impressed.  Spending that kind of money for a device that makes it easier to do something I don’t really do much of anyway?  No thanks.

But the text-to-speech thing caught my attention.  Apparently, people want the option of having their book read to them.  And that’s the first time where I really said, “Well, yeah.  Duh.  I want it read to me so much that I don’t even bother with the paper edition if I don’t have to.”

Of course, everybody recognizes that text-to-speech stinks.  The Author’s Guild, however, is trying to make the case that it is copyright infringement.  Of course they are – they want to sell you another audiobook.

But you know what?  What if we throw away all those differences and consider just one hybrid style “book that can read itself to you.”  When you download it, you’re also downloading the audio version.  Maybe you pay *a little* extra for this feature.  Maybe.  A little.  This idea of paying more for the book on CD than you do for the hardcover is insane.  Why not a hybrid?

Which gets me back to podiobooks.  It’s a fairly common practice for an author to syndicate the audio of his book, and then a value add offer a PDF copy for free, in anticipation of the hopefully soon to be published print version.  This does me no good, I don’t want PDFs in my iTunes feed.

But what if those went straight to the Kindle?  What if instead of a PDF it was some sort of open ebook (like ePub format?), and every day when I turned on my kindle I’d have new chapters waiting to be read to me?  Maybe that’s overkill, maybe you forget about syndicated chapters and you just get the whole text and all the audio at once.

Maybe not.  Why not bring back serialized fiction?  Now you’re starting to get into cool crossovers like old time radio when every time you turn on your Kindle you just plain don’t know what’s going to happen next.  You seriously have to wait for the next chapter in the story.

Where’s the text come in, though?  If the story's already being read to me via iPod, what value is the Kindle?  Lots.  Maybe I want to read the text for myself.  Maybe I’m not in a place where I can listen, and I prefer to sit down and actually relax by reading.  Maybe the text of each chapter comes out a week before the audio.  And what about pictures?  There’s plenty of things you can express in a real book that you cannot do in audio alone, a limitation that all the great podiobook authors are experimenting with as we speak. And that doesn’t even begin to factor in ideas like switching to video to get your point across (I don’t think the Kindle does video, so I won’t go down that path).

Throw in a few social networking features, like the ability to send a free sample to a friend?  And I think you’d have a major win on your hands – a whole revolution in independent ebooks.  Forget about fighting with the Author’s Guild over who has the rights to charge what.  Let podiobooks on the thing and let the best content win.  If you as the author want to give it away, go for it.  If you want to charge, and people want to pay? Why not?

Bluff Called

Last night, while rocking my son (who’s coming up on 3) to sleep:

“What song do you want me to sing?”

“Shakespeare.”

Love it.  “One of the sonnets, or maybe something from Hamlet?” I said, to amuse myself as well as Mommy, who was just leaving the room.

“Hamlet.”

Oh, crap.  I was joking.  Oh well.  So I sang him the “What A Piece Of Work Is Man” number, from HAIR.  Good thing I didn’t say Macbeth.

:)!

Movie Review : Get Over It

(My apologies to whoever pointed me this movie, I’ve forgotten whether it was here on the blog or Twitter or elsewhere.)

Get Over It is, for the most part, your standard high school romantic comedy:  nerdy guy has awesome girl, nerdy guy loses awesome girl to handsome jerk.  Even more awesome girl (Kirsten Dunst) comes along who loves nerdy guy, but he doesn’t see it because he’s too busy trying to win back awesome girl #1.  Blah blah, awesome girl #1 learns what a fool she’s been and wants nerdy guy back, nerdy guy decides that awesome girl #2 is the better choice, happily ever after.

Now take that plot and drop it on top of a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Interesting.  Especially when you have handsome jerk playing Lysander, nerdy guy as Demetrius, original awesome girl as Hermia and new and better awesome girl as Helena.

Now do it as a musical.  Directed by Martin Short, playing one of those standard “washed up actor who goes on to direct high school theatre” roles (very similar to the Hamlet 2 thing that just came around last year).  Is it me or does Kirsten Dunst try to sing in all her movies? 

It’s… cute.  With any movie like this, I typically watch it for the Shakespeare.  While the jokes are pretty standard stuff, there’s some funny bits.  When’s the last time you caught yourself humming a catchy tune from Macbeth?  Shakespeare may have been a great poet but he’s no Burt Bacharach!

The ending, truthfully, was a surprise.  I mean, not in the “Nerdy guy gets the right girl” thing, that always happens.  I mean how it all goes down.  Actually it came down to a single word, which I found possibly the funniest part of the whole movie, but I can’t explain it without ruining the joke.

If you collect this sort of stuff you might have missed it when it first came around.  I know I’d never heard of it. 

Shakespeare Shoes

http://www.zazzle.com/lovequoteshoes/shakespeare+gifts

No, seriously.  Shakespeare on shoes.

I don’t think I could get my wife to wear these, but what the heck, they might catch someone’s eye.

[Note that this is not my store, I get no kickback, and have no idea who’s store it is.]

“Wrestler” Star Heading To Shakespeare

http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/news/2009-02-24-evan-rachel-wood_N.htm?csp=34

No, not Mickey Rourke, although the way people talk about his performance you might wonder if he could do Lear.

They’re talking about Evan Rachel Wood, who plays the daughter in the movie.  She’s going to be doing some Juliet.

 

Saw The Wrestler last week.  The acting is very, very good.  The writing is very, very good.  The movie itself, and the directing, are pretty disturbingly violent.  But the  overarching story, this idea of a real life human being who spends his life only knowing how to do one thing, is perhaps the most upsetting.  You get a clear glimpse of how horrible it is to do what he does, but an equally clear look at how he fails at doing everything else, and thus has no choice but to do this other horrible thing over and over again, forever.  It actually reminded me of the scifi classic “Armor”, by John Steakley (I think I have that name right), about the soldier who, every time he thinks he can sit and rest, gets sent off to another battle, because he is a human machine that is just too good at it and not capable of anything else.

It’s the kind of thing that makes you walk out of the theatre with your first thought being, “Life is not like that” and your second being, “God, I hope it’s not.”

Free Shakespeare Cards For Everybody

http://bardfilm.blogspot.com/2009/02/shakespeare-author-cards.html

Over at Bardfilm they’ve got up a freely downloadable version of the “Authors” card game, naturally with Shakespeare theme.

I don’t think I’ve ever played this game, but I expect I’ll give it a try.  Who knows, maybe with the kids?  Looks kind of like Go Fish, only instead of asking for matches (“Got any 3’s?”) you ask for plays (“Got any Richard II / Second Tetralogy?”)

The cards are themed like a typical deck – Queen of Hearts, etc… – I think the kids would dig it more if a card for Macbeth actually had Macbeth on it, or at least some sort of graphic indicative of the “High Tragedies”.

Shakespeare, The Entrepreneur

http://lateralaction.com/articles/shakespeare-entrepreneurship/

I like it.  Not just a biography of the business aspects of life, but an actual “Top 7” of lessons to be learned from Mr. Shakespeare, including such items as:

4. Own Your Domain

The Lord Chamberlain’s men owned the Globe Theatre in which they performed for most of their career. Unfortunately, they didn’t own the land in Shoreditch where it originally stood - they leased it from the owner, Giles Allen. When the lease expired, the landlord claimed ownership of the building, forcing the actors to desperate measures: on 28th December 1598, while the landlord was still celebrating Christmas, they armed themselves, and ‘liberated’ the theatre building, dismantling it and hiding it in a warehouse. They later shipped it across the Thames to a new site in Southwark. And because the new site was outside the official limits of the city, it meant they were beyond the jurisdiction of the city fathers, who were often keen to close down the theatres.

Takeaway: Establish your business on your own domain - don’t become someone else’s user generated content. Otherwise your enterprise will be ‘Like a fair house built on another man’s ground’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor).

My Mistress’ Eyes …

http://www.mahalo.com/answers/education/explain-a-sonnet

I’ve mentioned Mahalo before, the “human powered search engine” that hands out tip money for good answers.  In looking for some topic ideas I started a conversation on the sonnets, and already I’ve learned something.  I don’t know who this Gonzo Joe fellow is (he quite literally just joined, his answer to my question is his first answer on the system).  But check this out regarding Sonnet 130:

What I think is most interesting about this sonnet that no one has mentioned yet is the direct irony of the tone compared to sonnet 18. The "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" is probably the most well known of Shakespeare's sonnets among the general population because of its Hallmarkian cheesiness.

It's important to recognize that the irony is only of tone and not of theme, however. In fact, I would venture to say that 18 and 130 could be viewed as the same poem, written by the same man about the same women, the only difference being one is written in youth and the other is written at a much older age. This is, of course, not literally the case most likely, but thinking of them so does provide a nice framework for their explication.

If he’s not already hanging out here with us at Shakespeare Geek, methinks he should be :).

Speaking Shakespeare To The Dog

An new visitor and Anonymous commenter writes, “I’m looking for a word to use when training my new doggie. I need a ‘release’ word to let him know he’s done a good job and may move about freely, or get out of his sit position. Some words other people use include “okay”, "release", "bingo", "that'll do", or "free". I want a kool Shakespeare-like word. Does the Shakespeare Geek have any suggestions??”

Sounds like a fun topic.  There are of course the great exclamations like Forsooth! or Zounds!  but those are just funny words, they don’t really have any context.  What’s a good Shakespearean way to say what the commenter asks for?

Best To Worst

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/daniel_hannan/blog/2008/11/24/shakespeare_my_best_to_worst

I seem to have missed this when it was posted back in November, but the man’s got me in his Blog Roll, so it seems only fair that I give it a little credit.  Despite claiming that his “hits fall by 80% whenever he blogs about [Shakespeare]”, the article is a laundry list of best/worst elements you might find at some sort of funky modern awards show, like “Handsomest Line” (The sun doth gild our armour; up, my lords!) versus “Ugliest Line” (leaky as an unstanched wench), or “Line most likely to provoke moronic laughter” (“Put out the light, and then put out the light”).

Fascinated by his Best Hamlet, someone I’d never heard of.

Pop Shakespeare

http://community.livejournal.com/shaksper_random/44826.html

The gang at Shakesper_Random is thinking of “any songs that they associate with Shakespearean characters and/or Shakespearean romantic pairings!”

Example?  “Under My Thumb” for Kate / Petruchio.

Got it?  Go play.

Most Romantic Movie Couples

http://www.premiere.com/Feature/The-65-Most-Romantic-Movie-Couples

Nothing direct from Mr. Shakespeare, but I’ll assume that would be cheating. 

However, we do get Shakespeare In Love (#54), and 10 Things I Hate About You (#32, re-telling of Taming Of The Shrew).

Any others in that mix with a Shakespeare hook? I know that Never Been Kissed (#31) has a prom these of “famous romantic couples” but honestly can’t remember if anybody does Romeo and Juliet (or Anthony and Cleo).

Yo Dawg

http://pics.livejournal.com/reasonabsurd/pic/0004hx49

Is “Yo Dawg” the new “I Can Haz”? Seems like a bunch of these just went flying through my newsreader.

Still A Shakespeare Nerd

We had a couple of friends (literally – one married couple) over for dinner Saturday night.  I’m hanging out in the kitchen talking to the husband, the wives are in the family room chatting about something on the couch.

We wander into the family room to be social.  “Tell neighbor wife what you wrote on the card for my flowers,” my wife tells me.

“The bath for my help lies where Cupid found new fire, my mistress’ eyes.”

I get a blank stare from neighbor wife.

“That’s the closing couplet from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 153.”

“This is the kinds of stuff I get,” says my wife.  “Underneath that he wrote You’re my everything.  THAT, I understood.  But I’m always getting these Shakespeare things.  What did you get?”

Neighbor wife turns to her husband and says, “Nothing.”

Mind you, the husband is your classic working man, general contractor, spends his days framing out houses and his nights brewing his own beer.  When he’s not wearing a flannel shirt it’s only because his wife made him dress up to go out somewhere.  I love the guy, and not just because I appreciate a good beer.  He’s a great guy, a good friend.  And I’m suddenly getting him in trouble because I’m quoting Shakespeare on Valentine’s presents.

20+ years ago that would have gotten me stuffed into my locker in high school.

Advice For Cold Reading?

Well isn’t this fun!  Congratulations to Josie, a high school student who just won a trip to NYC for the National English Speaking Union’s Shakespeare Competition!  She writes in the comments:

I've given it my all,but next round is sure to be a challenge.i am to perform a sonnet and a 20 line monologue (tamora from titus andronicus act 1 scene 1 and sonnet 29)the only diffrence is i am also expected to be able to cold read a random monologe that they pick for me and i'll only have but a minute to look over it :( This competition is based more on the understanding of a piece than the actual performance i would like to know what advice you could give on cold reading shakespeare. Thank you,
Josie

I wish I was in a position to help, but I’ve never been a performer of this stuff so I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to deliver a “cold reading”.  Help from the audience?

Here’s my best advice, with the above disclaimer in mind.  I’ll use Sonnet 29 as an example, since you have to do it anyway, and not only do I have it in my playlist (Rufus Wainwright, seriously, check him out), I have the lyrics pinned up on my wall at the office:

Try your best to find what you feel is the essence of the passage, and then work backwards.  Surely, in 20 lines or so, there is guaranteed to be a passage that clicks with you, that you immediately think “Ok, that makes sense, I get that.”  Then reconstruct as much as you can around that – what came before, what after?  Why?  I once described Sonnet 29 to somebody this way:  “Some days I’m sad and hate my life and I don’t really know why, but you know what?  I think about having you in my life and realize I wouldn’t change anything for the world.”

Where’d I get that?  Mostly from “Haply I think on thee.”  I get that.  Makes sense.  What’s right before it?  “Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising.”  That’s the twist to be found in all the sonnets – the first half is clearly about these “self despising thoughts”, and it’s the “thinking on thee” that turns it all around from there.

Maybe that’s a silly example, maybe it’s too trivial for what you’re going to do, I don’t know.  You’ve got more courage in you than I do, I’ll tell you that!  I could never get up on stage, much less compete at it.

Good luck!!

Hemingway, Steinbeck and Shakespeare on Twitter

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10164117-2.html

It’s stories like these that make me feel like I’m not doing justice to this blog.  Peter Sagal, host of NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me Show (that I listen to), posed a challenge on his Twitter page (which I was not following) to come up with “Twittered” versions of Shakespeare and other classics.   This is classic geekery, Web2.0 mashup stuff at its finest.  And I’m late to the game.  Enjoy, if you haven’t already.

(Twitter, for those now in the know, is the latest fad where you try to explain the current state of your life to your followers…in 140 characters.)

• My no-good daughters are making me crazy! (King Lear)

• Let's invade France and marry their women! (Henry V )

The Game’s Afoot!

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=556

This is apparently from 2002, but I don’t think I’d ever seen it.  A chess/Shakespeare/computer crossover?  Love it!

Seems that the computer (one Deep Fritz) may have been heckling the world champion (Kramnik) using Shakespearean taunts. 

The conspirators rigged up several speakers around Kramnik’s chair and set them at volumes low enough that only Kramnik might hear the computer’s chatter. That the computer was talking to him doubtless distracted Kramnik; that Fritz was speaking entirely in Shakespearean verse surely drove Kramnik mad, prompting the questionable, Morphy-esque Knight sacrifice at f7.

(I am pretty sure, by the way, that the whole thing is a joke :)).

Sonnets And “The Art Of Passionate Excess”, by Robert Pinsky

http://www.slate.com/id/2211066

A quick history of the sonnet form, by Robert Pinsky.  Extra credit for mentioning Shakespeare, but then never actually using a Shakespeare sonnet as one of his many examples of the evolution of the form.

Shakespeare wrote his sonnets as part of a literary vogue, the great sonnet fad of the 1590s. Inspired by Sir Philip Sidney's sequence "Astrophil and Stella" (itself based on the Italian sonnets of Petrarch and popularized via early, Napster-like piracy), English poets and booksellers of that decade produced hundreds of sonnet sequences. The product in each case was a series of witty, hyperbolic 14-line love poems, addressed to a lady who, in theory, would be flattered and won by the poet's elaborate, inventive descriptions of her tremendous beauty, her cruel resistance, and the agony she inflicted on the author. She tortures him with her beauty and coldness, he says; and yet his praises, and his clever descriptions of the pain she causes him, will make her immortal.

When you put it like that, it makes the whole Fair Youth / Dark Lady autobiographical conspiracy theories sound sort of…dumb?

Do The Eyes Have It?

I’m a pretty big believer in that whole “eyes are the windows to the soul” thing.  Ask me if there’s beauty in a person, and I’ll look at the eyes first.  Does that make me an eye man?  Ain’t nothing in the world like a big-eye’d girl, as the song goes…;)

But let’s talk Shakespeare.  When I picked Sonnet 17 to be “our” sonnet (that being my wife and I, not you my dear reader), it was this one line that stood out: 

If I could write the beauty in your eyes, and in fresh numbers number all your graces, the age to come would say “This poet lies, such heavenly touches never touched earthly faces.”

(Yes I was lazy with the syntax of the original there.)

For Valentine’s this year, on the card for my wife’s roses, I wrote this:

The bath for my help lies where Cupid got new fire – my mistress’ eyes.

That’s from Sonnet 154.

Then of course there’s the famous sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…”

I’m at work and don’t really have time to write a small novel on the subject, so I thought I’d throw it out there for discussion – were eyes a particular theme of Shakespeare’s more so than other things?  Am I just seeing what I want to see?  I went combing through the sonnets last night and actually found him referring to his own eyes (most often in the context of “I get to see how beautiful you are”), but very often he does speak of “thine eyes” or “mistress’ eyes” and so on.

 

I figure Carl’s going to have some input (and tell me to read his book :)).  Anybody else?  Don’t be shy.

Twitter Of The Shrew

http://mashable.com/2009/02/12/shakespeare-twitter/

Don’t miss Twitter Of The Shrew this weekend! 

“Spanning 19 Twitter accounts and presented over 12 days (one scene daily), Twitter of the Shrew attempts to live up to Shakespeare’s “Brevity is the soul of wit” proverb, by condensing the play’s iambic pentameter dialogue down to updates of 140 characters or less.“

The poor author of the article doesn’t seem to get the meta-culture value of the project.  He says, “I don’t see a classical play functioning too well in this form.”  No kidding.  I think that’s part of the reason they didn’t choose Lear or something, they chose a play about relationships and gossip and stereotypes, exactly paralleling the Twitterverse.

Science / Shakespeare Crossover : High Geek Factor

http://www.physorg.com/news153595290.html

I am still trying to absorb this aticle, and I have not watched the video yet, but the subject matter is so up my alley that I can’t wait to post it.  It’s all about a technique for analyzing large groups of stuff called “feature frequency profiles”, or FFP.  In theory, you can apply the technique to anything that might have patterns in it – DNA, music taste…and, of course, the works of Shakespeare.

Kim and his colleagues later applied the FFP technique to a comparative analysis of the works of William Shakespeare, contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe, plus several works from the Jacobean era that were once attributed to Shakespeare but whose authorships are now in question. The results cast new doubt on Shakespeare having been the author of the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and point to his authorship of the comedy Two Noble Kinsmen, for which in the past he has only received partial credit.

In that particular case I don’t think of it so much as a discovery, since there’s already been doubt on those plays – but if the FFP algorithm also kicked those out as questionable, without having been told, that’d be pretty impressive.

Congratulations to Rebel Shakespeare!

Just got word that the Salem, Mass group Rebel Shakespeare is set to receive a “major award” for their work in making the Salem parks a better place, specifically regarding their 2008 Romeo and Juliet production.  The Rebels range in age from 5-19, and I got the chance to see a least a piece of their Henry V last summer.  I hate that I missed their Romeo and Juliet, where somebody had the absolutely brilliant idea to play it out in and around one of those massive playground climbing structures in the middle of the park. 

Congratulations to Keri and Christine, leaders of the Rebel forces!  I look forward to catching several of their shows this year – maybe I’ll get the geeklets to Midsummer?  We shall see…

ADMIN :Redirect Nonsense

Just a quick note of apology to anybody that’s coming in on www.shakespearegeek.com and seeing a silly redirect message.  Not quite sure why that suddenly started coming up, but I have been mucking around at my hosting provider so it looks like I broke something.  I’ll try to have it fixed tonight.

UPDATE: All fixed!

Old Meme : Twenty Five Random Things About…Shakespeare

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=401633472&blogID=468835770

12 I keepe my Stashe hidden in our seconde best bedde. Shhh. Don’t tell the Fyve-Oh.

 

!! I love it.

Marlowe Did It

http://bigtweet.com/c/b/twitter/lowercase_dave/38uA88

I’m at least somewhat familiar with the Marlowe authorship story – faked his death, blah blah blah.  Here we have a nice little 15 minutes of video from a documentary filmmaker who goes into detail about why he believes the theory.

Vote For The Shakespeare Hall Of Fame

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/poll/2009/feb/04/shakespeare-hall-fame

I like the idea.  Loses major credibility for including Leonardo DiCaprio, who no matter how good he may or may not have been as Romeo still really has just the one credit to his name – but maybe they felt the need to pull in the younger crowd?

What’s cooler is that we get to vote on the remaining member.

But how could it *not* be John Gielgud?  He gets my vote.

UPDATE:  The results make it look like David Tennant is a shoe-in.  That upsets me, I hate popularity contests.  I’m sure the Dr. Who guy is a fine Shakespearean actor, but I mean come on, Gielgud was doing Shakespeare longer than Tennant’s been alive!

Hitler Was A Shakespeare Geek?

http://shakespeare.about.com/b/2009/01/13/hitler-shakespeares-most-controversial-fan.htm

I think I missed this when it came around a few weeks ago.  Hitler was in the habit of quoting (badly) Julius Caesar?

It doesn’t bother me as much as others, it seems.  It’s not like Mr. Shakespeare had anything to do with what Mr. Hitler did with his life. 

Al Pacino … as KING LEAR?!

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117999542.html?categoryid=13&cs=1

Wow.  Oh, geez.  Umm…. I think I’m a little speechless.

The first thing that comes to mind is “Oh, crap, the director is the same guy that did Pacino’s Merchant – and that got crucified by the Shakespeare crowd.”  (See Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare Wars for a good example of said crucifixion.)

But…it’s Pacino!  Can he do it?  Does he still have the chops?  Is Michael Corleone/Tony Montana/Sonny Wortzik still in there?  Or would we get the a screaming half-deaf Lear ala Colonel Frank Slade?  COME NOT…BETWEEN THE DRAGON, AND HIS WRATH!  HOO-AH!

Seriously, has Pacino ever had it in him to play Lear?  He’s been a great actor, no doubt – but has he ever really had that kind of range?

AND THE WINNERS ARE….

I want to thank everybody for participating in our “Bill Bryson For Everyone And Their Grandma” contest, sponsored by Harper Collins. 

The winners, chosen randomly from all the entries received, are…

ANN (from Shakespeare Tavern), who wrote:
I'd give one to the volunteer coordinator at the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern (http://www.shakespearetavern.com/). Not only does she enjoy that sort of book, but she often leaves them out for everyone else to read and gives them as gifts.

REN GIRL, who wrote:
I would keep one to read, & give one to my school's drama department. Unlike the Big State School down the road from us, we don't have a full-on drama library, just the shelves of our professors & some older books (hard to get to) locked up in our greenroom, but I would LOVE to start a drama library collection that we could just waltz in & borrow whenever we wanted. I'd start with something fun & light but good, like this book. :)

and…

LIANE66, who wrote:
I would keep one and give the other to my college son.

 

Congratulations!  Winners, please contact me with your mailing address so Harper Collins can send your books along.    Thanks to everyone who participated, hopefully this puts Shakespeare Geek on the radar for more book publishers looking to give away their goods!

King Lear, With Laser Cats

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/digital-short-laser-cats-4/981341/

I found it pretty stupid, but what kind of Shakespeare Geek would I be if Steve Martin dropped a Shakespeare reference on Saturday Night Live and I missed it?

Benjamin Button And Shakespeare

Just say “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” last night, and it’s got Shakespeare in it.

As a general movie rule I find that whenever a character says that he was raised on classics or learned to read from classics, a Shakespeare quote is coming.  So when “Tizzy” said, “I learned to read when I was five.  My grandfather was a dresser for a famous actor…”  I was expecting Shakespeare. What I got was this:

 "Kind keepers of my weak decaying
               age, Let dying Mortimer here rest
               himself. Even like a man new
               haled from the rack. So fare my
               limbs with long imprisonment. And
               these gray locks, the pursuivants
               of death, Nestor-like aged in an
               age of care, Argue the end of
               Edmund Mortimer."

I have to admit, I did not recognize it.  Though I kept the name “Edmund Mortimer” in my head to look up later.  The character Tizzy goes on to say that the “great actor” was John Wilkes Booth, who Shakespeare geeks will know was an accomplished Shakespearean actor in his own right.

Later in the movie, in a voice over about people’s purpose in life, the narrator does indeed say “Some know Shakespeare”, so I knew I had to find the reference.

Turns out, if you didn’t already recognize it, that it’s from Henry VI, Part One.

 

By the way I have no idea how accurate it is, but I was very surprised and pleased to find the entire script online!  Maybe it’s not perfect, but all I needed to do was recall the Shakespeare quote :).